The Chinese education startup VIPKid, which connects
fluent English-speaking teachers with Chinese students, raised
$500 million in April for a valuation of over $3
billion.

The company is led by its 35-year-old high-school
dropout founder, Cindy Mi, who believes the company can help
bridge cultural gaps between China, the US, and elsewhere while
making high-quality education accessible and increasing
interactions between people of different cultures.

The company faces stiff competition but has thus far
succeeded in large part because of its fervent community of
more than 38,000 teachers, who generally seem enthusiastic
about both the mission and the opportunity for supplemental
income.

At the same time, some teachers of color have reported
experiencing rude, awkward, ignorant, or racist incidents with
parents and students.

The company has faced criticism from some teachers of
color who say the company is not being proactive enough about
addressing the issue.

Cindy Mi, the 35-year-old founder
and CEO of the online-class startup VIPKid, remembers the day the
education system failed her.

Mi was 14 and had just moved to
Harbin, a city in northeast China. The move cost her half a
semester of school, and she was severely behind the rest of her
new class in math. With a class of 60 students, her teacher had
little time to help Mi catch up.

A vicious cycle ensued: With
little time to personalize lessons, the teacher would ignore Mi's
requests to further explain concepts. Later, the teacher would
call on Mi to answer questions, but - not understanding the
concepts - she couldn't answer. The teacher became convinced Mi
either didn't care to learn or was incapable.

Eventually, Mi withdrew into
herself, reading science-fiction magazines hidden in her
notebooks during class. One day, Mi recalls, the teacher noticed,
strolled over to her desk, ripped up the books, threw them in her
face, and told her to get out and never come back.

"I left the classroom like a
hero, but I had to return to school the next day, begging for her
to take me back," Mi told Business Insider in a recent interview.
"I lost all my confidence in learning."

The anecdote is something like
Mi's origin story for VIPKid, the education company she founded
in 2013 to connect fluent English-speaking teachers with young
Chinese students for one-on-one 25-minute virtual tutoring
lessons, in which students are taught English through an
immersive curriculum that covers simple concepts like holidays
and more complex topics like current events.

The Beijing-based startupraised $500 millionearlier this year at a valuation
of over $3 billion and grew its revenue to $760 million last year
from $300 million in 2016. The company said in August that it has
over 500,000 students and over 60,000 teachers on the platform,
close to double
what was reported last year, and a massive jump from 3,305
students and 404 educators in 2015.

That makes it one of the
fastest-growing startups not only in education tech, in which
companies use technology to improve learning, but in all of
China.

In her relentlessly positive and
earnest way, Mi said she didn't blame the teacher for her
inability to teach her. In a class of 60 students, she said, it
would be impossible to provide the special attention many
students need. But it is why she founded VIPKid.

In a country hungry to learn

caption

The entrance to the company's original headquarters in a converted Taoist temple in Beijing. Most of the company has since moved to a much larger office.

In just five years, VIPKid has
grown exponentially by capitalizing on China's appetite for
quality education.

Education, and particularly
English education, has long been a major focus of Chinese
culture. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and
Development went so far as to write in 2016 that the Chinese
government saw education as the primary tool for "national
development." In
recent years, the education market has exploded in China along
with the country's middle class. The banking group UBShas said the extracurricular
education marketin
China could grow to $165 billion in five years.

The first wave of tutoring
companies in China came in the 1990s and early 2000s with
brick-and-mortar classrooms, as the Chinese government placed a
heavy emphasis on English proficiency as a hallmark of national
competitiveness.By 2014,
more than50,000 private language
schoolshad opened in
China, run by a mix of corporations and family-owned
shops.

The biggest of those companies,
New Oriental Education & Technology Group, founded by a
Peking University professor named Yu Minhong in 1993, is
projected to reach $2.2 billion in revenue this year. TAL
Education, founded in 2003, operates more than 500 schools
andreported revenue of $1.72
billionthis fiscal
year.

While the English education
industry may be thriving, quality English teachers are still
difficult to find in China, particularly outside big cities like
Beijing and Shanghai, and brick-and-mortar classes are
expensive.

caption

A VIPKid employee takes a call at the company's original headquarters in a converted Taoist temple in Beijing.

Mi says there are only 27,000
qualified English teachers from North America in China, hardly
enough for the country'snearly 300 million young
people. As a result,
many are turning to online classes like those provided by VIPKid.
The online English-tutoring marketis expected to hit $8
billionby next year,
according to iResearch, a research group focusing on the Chinese
internet.

Mi is no stranger to English
education. She was part of that first wave. In 2000, at the age
of 17, Mi dropped out of school to found ABCEnglish, a
brick-and-mortar English education company, with her uncle. Her
parents were encouraging.

"They said to me, 'Make the
decision and don't come back in tears.' I learned the hard way
early on in life that I need to be responsible for what I'm
getting into," Mi said.

ABCEnglish was a small company
competing among giants.

She did a little of everything to
make it run: sales, buying books, interviewing prospective
teachers, teaching classes, grading homework. She worked early in
the morning until 10 at night.When she finished, she worked on her own
studies until 2 a.m., eventually earning a bachelor's degree in
English literature from Beijing Foreign Language University
through China's system of incredibly difficult self-taught
exams.

Eventually, she and her uncle
grew the brick-and-mortar teaching business to $30 million in
annual sales. But, like many entrepreneurs, she always wanted
more: another challenge, more impact.

Building the global classroom

caption

VIPKid CEO and founder Cindy Mi takes a photo with a VIPKid teacher at a meet-and-greet with teachers in Austin, Texas earlier this year.

source

Courtesy of VIPKID

To call VIPKid a language company
misses the point. Like most tech entrepreneurs, Mi has a utopian
vision that, while far outpacing today's operations, advances
itself in the margins.

The near-term goal of VIPKid may
be to democratize high-quality education, but Mi thinks the
company can help create a generation of global citizens who
understand the way the world is interconnected and thus promote
understanding across cultures. For Mi, it has always been clear
to her that language learning isn't really about the language.
She taught herself how to speak English by immersing herself in
American pop culture and English literature. The first songs she
learned: John Denver's "Take Me Home, Country Roads" and
"Yesterday Once More" by the Carpenters.

"It's about knowing the world and
empathizing with other cultures," Mi said. "In China we talk a
lot about this 'shared future' concept. But how do you share a
future if you don't really empathize or understand each
other?"

“I only commit to things that have a mission.”

caption

VIPKid CEO and founder Cindy Mi talks to teachers at a meetup in Central Park in July. Kevyn Klein, VIPKid’s US-based head of community and growth is third from the left.

source

Courtesy of VIPKID

When Mi begins to speak about the
future, her eyes grow big and her ever-present smile broadens
even more than usual. She speaks in grand terms, talking about
building a "global classroom," mentioning the book turned movie
"Ready Player One" and the ability of a virtual world to be one
where people from all over the world are able to understand one
another better by learning together.

"What if you had students
gathering around the pyramids virtually to learn everything about
them?" Mi riffed. "What if you had a classroom of students, each
from a different country, talking to each other in a global
channel? In my beautiful future dreams, I see children learning
from one another."

That grand mission is what
drewKevyn Klein, VIPKid's US-based head of community and
growth, to the company. After spending her first decade in the
workforce split between the idealism of the nonprofit Teach For
America, for which she taught for three years, and the sometimes
difficult reality of education tech, where she worked after,
Klein said she felt jaded. Mi's optimistic vision was what Klein
had been waiting to hear.

"I only commit to things that
have a mission," Klein told Business Insider. "When I heard
Cindy's mission to use a global classroom to create global
citizens, I realized that this was so much more than an ESL
company."

The mission and the acolytes

caption

Developers work on VIPKid's platform from the company's original headquarters in a converted Taoist temple in Beijing. Most of the company has since moved to a much larger office.

Speaking with Business Insider,
Mi talked at length about how the worldly perspective she says
she gained from studying for her MBA at Johnson Cornell in the US
was accessible to only a select - primarily wealthy - few.

"We always talk about how
diplomats' kids understand the world in a very different way," Mi
said. "They're able to connect with everyone when they grow up.
But what if we have kids everywhere be ambassadors of their own
cultures, learn about other cultures, and become ambassadors for
other cultures?"

The mission has drawn more than a
few acolytes.

"This is a global conversation
that is happening and has to happen," Yasche Glass, a 43-year-old
high-school science teacher who has been teaching for VIPKid
since 2016, told Business Insider. "With the way technology is
evolving, there is no cultural divides anymore.

"We have a real opportunity to
reach people in their homes more than we've ever been able to
before."

As with most gig-economy
companies, appealing to teachers is as important to VIPKid as
drawing in new parents and student customers. Today, many
competitors, such as 51Talk, DadaABC, and VIPJunior, are
competing for the same pool of teachers.

But VIPKid has a higher valuation
and more students than its competitors, by most accounts, and is
known to place a high value on its teachers and generate fervor
among its teacher community.

caption

VIPKid's offices are emblazoned with Dino, the company mascot is, who teachers say you don't really understand until you see how students react to him in class.

In March, VIPKid held a teacher
conference in Salt Lake City called Journey. About 250 teachers
attended at their own expense. The attendees ended up purchasing
$7,000 worth VIPKid merchandise, including mugs, T-shirts, and
stuffed animals, Mi said. Another Journey conference is scheduled
for August.

A week or two earlier, VIPKid
held a gathering for teachers in Texas, the company's biggest
community of teachers, 5,000 in total. Fifty teachers came with
their families to meet Mi. At one point, the teachers - having
all heard Mi's story of learning English to John Denver - broke
out in song, singing "Take Me Home, Country Roads" in its
entirety.

Though teaching for VIPKid is
undoubtedly an individual endeavor - one-on-one teacher to
student - the company and many of its teachers seem to pride
themselves on the vibrant support community online, primarily
expressed through Facebook groups with massive membership (one
group boasts more than 15,000 teachers).

Operating like a digital teachers
lounge, the conversation in the Facebook groups largely tends
toward the relentlessly positive disposition of the
company.

Teachers discuss teaching
strategies, difficult students, troubles getting booked,
financial difficulties, and how to get through the February slump
(around the Lunar New Year, bookings drop off a cliff as Chinese
students go on long vacations to visit family), all through
can-do encouragement. Offline meet-ups like Lunar New Year
celebrations have followed.

While Klein, and the company,
support the groups, most were started by teachers.

"So much of this is driven by"
the teachers, said Klein, who has built teacher communities for
numerous edutech startups. "That's the difference. When teachers
are choosing what company they want to work for, they want a
company invested in their success."

Lost in translation

caption

A group portrait of VIPKid teachers at the company's Journey conference in Salt Lake City, Utah in March.

source

Courtesy of VIPKID

Not all teacher-student
interactions begin smoothly, however, and the experience of some
VIPKid teachers illustrates the challenges in carrying out Mi's
utopian vision.

Teachers on the
VIPKid Teachers of Color Facebook group, which has more than 1,800 members,
frequently describe having unsettling interactions with parents
and students or difficulties booking students that they feel is
tied to their race, according to Tameka Bazile, who began working
for VIPKid in October and started the page in November after
being unable to find a similar group in the teacher
community.

ESL companies in China, and many
of the parents and students who pay for the classes, have long
been known to prefer foreign teachers to be white. While
discrimination is prohibited in China by various laws and the
government has worked to address the problem, employment
discriminationis common. Some ESL companies outright say in ads
theywouldn't hire Asian or black
teachers.

"Many Chinese people still
associate English proficiency with white skin, assuming that
anyone who is black must be from Africa, and those who are Asian
obviously don't speak English as well as their white peers,"
Richelle Gamlam, a blogger who previously taught English in
China,wrote in a blog in
2016.

The more than half-dozen teachers
interviewed for this article said no such issue existed for
VIPKid, but many described awkward interactions with students or
with parents who booked the service.

Cecily Cooper, a public-school
ESL teacher who started working for VIPKid in January 2017, said
it was not uncommon for parents booking a trial class - in which
VIPKid chooses the teacher - to see her face and say, "Oh my god,
she's black." In most cases, the reaction is simply surprise:
Most Chinese people have never met or interacted with a black
person before.

In February,Beatrice Carre-Alleyne, a 43-year-old black
woman who began teaching for VIPKid in 2017,
posted a video on Facebook in which a 7-year-old student,
upon seeing Carre-Alleyne,
exclaimed that she was a "monster" and "ugly" and made a
reference to her race.

"I was surprised. I was hurt. I
was angry. I wanted to cancel the class," Carre-Alleyne told
Business Insider in an interview. "Then I saw that her face
wasn't angry or malicious but just curious."

In the Facebook video,
Carre-Alleyne can be heard gently correcting and challenging the
student, turning the incident into a teachable moment.

"I know she is trying to ask
something," she told Business Insider. "I wanted to give her a
space to do that, while also voicing my opinions about what she
said."

The response to the video from
fellow teachers, according to Carre-Alleyne, was "overwhelming."
Two days after the video was published, VIPKid contacted
Carre-Alleyne, she said, to invite her to the Journey conference,
where Mi apologized to her personally for the incident.

"We don’t look like what they stereotypically think of as an American."

Bazile said it was not uncommon
for teachers of color to experience similar interactions and that
many were "amazing" at turning them into "teachable moments."
But, she said, there remains a feeling among many teachers of
color that VIPKid could be doing more to mitigate such issues
before they occur.

Tamesha Rumbles, a
California-based VIPKid teacher,
described in a July vlog on YouTubehow one student, upon seeing a picture of a
black family in the lesson plan, began saying "yucky dark
family." In a class about strangers, Rumbles said, another
teacher she knew asked the student, "Who are the bad people?" The
student instantly responded, "Dark people." In both cases,
Rumbles said, the teachers corrected the student.

"What we are talking about is not
made up," Rumbles said in the video. "What we are talking about
is not exaggerated."

In a statement, the company said it is "concerned" to hear
about the interactions, that it "takes all reports of offensive
or inappropriate behavior" seriously, and that it is "company
policy to review" all such reports, and, "where necessary, take
appropriate steps to address it." The company added that it has
confidence that "as students become more accustomed to the
diversity of teachers" on the platform, such interactions can
"effect a change of attitude in the students toward teachers of
different races and cultures."

Glass,the high-school science teacher, who is
black, said that while some teachers have experienced such
incidents, she often experienced "open-minded parents" who booked
her precisely because they wanted to expose their children
globally.

"We don't look like what they
stereotypically think of as an American," Glass said. "But I
don't think it's bigotry. They just don't know."

Glass, who teaches primarily
older students, said her students frequently asked about the
black experience in America, often prompted by the
curriculum.A lesson on
"America's Heroes," according to VIPKid, introduces students to
African-American figures like Harriet Tubman and Martin Luther
King Jr., as well as the history of slavery and the civil rights
movement. Another lesson introduces students to the pan-African
holiday of Kwanzaa and its historical roots.

"We're teaching things that are
not even found in American textbooks," Glass said.

But not all are happy with the
curriculum's representation of race.

In April, Bazile and Hope
Williams, a VIPKid teacher who was previously an administrator of
VIPKid Teachers Community,
one of the largest Facebook groups at more than 15,000
members, held a
wide-ranging public Facebook Live session to discuss issues faced
by teachers of color. One particular point of concern expressed
by both was how nonwhites were represented in the curriculum. In
one example, the two discussed how a lesson about occupations
showed an image of a white working professional followed by a
black janitor.

"To a lot of teachers this is not
a big deal," Bazile said. "But perception is reality, and the
reality of it is you are creating what I would interpret as
subliminal messaging to these students."

The company said, in a statement,
that the lesson on occupations shows multiple images of janitors,
depicted as a Caucasian woman and Caucasian man, in addition to
the image of the African-American man.

"We welcome and listen to teacher feedback on the curriculum and
have made (and continue to make) changes to reflect such
feedback," the company said, adding that it is "sensitive to the
issue" and strives to create a curriculum that is "balanced,
respectful, and sensitive to the value of diversity."

Bazile, whose day job is as a
residence coordinator at La Salle University, said VIPKid had
acted swiftly in dealing with specific issues raised by teachers,
such as removing parent feedback directly referring to a
teacher's race.

But, she said, she and fellow
members of the Teachers of Color group have called for VIPKid to
act "proactively" by teaching the company's parent customers
about diversity in America, involving teachers of color in the
construction of the curriculum, featuring teachers of color in
advertisements in China, and releasing a statement to the
company's Chinese customers explicitly supporting teachers of
color.

In response, the company told
Business Insider in a statement that it "treasure[s] the
tremendous diversity" of the teacher community, noting that many
of the most active teachers on the platform and in the community
"come from diverse racial and ethnic backgrounds." The company
also said that it strives to "accurately depict" its "diverse
teacher representation" in ads and branding and that it
"welcome[s] this feedback."

American kids used to learn from Mr. Rogers — Chinese kids now have VIPKid teachers

caption

VIPKid teachers pose with CEO and founder Cindy Mi at a teacher meetup.

source

Courtesy of VIPKID

Despite the challenges teachers
face individually, Mi's vision of a global classroom is already
being realized.

To illustrate how, Klein paints a
scenario common to VIPKid teachers and students: A 5- or
6-year-old Chinese student signs on to VIPKid for the morning
lesson from an American teacher in rural Mississippi. The student
is sitting in his or her parents' restaurant, or perhaps at
grandparents' house.

"What you are seeing on a bigger
community level is an American teacher entering a Chinese home,
meeting the parents and grandparents," Klein said. "When we were
growing up, we were exposed to Mr. Rogers. Right now, they are
being exposed to all these diverse teachers."

The growth in understanding isn't
theoretical. It's happening on the ground - and not just for the
Chinese students but for the primarily American teachers as well.
This past year, members of the VIPKid teachers' community - many
of whom have had little, if any, previous interactions with
Chinese people - independently organized 50 Lunar New Year
celebrations across the country.

Last August, VIPKid
launched Lingo Bus, a one-on-one teaching platform for
children to learn Mandarin Chinese from fluent speakers. VIPKid
has said it hopes the platform can work for American children in
much the same way VIPKid has operated for Chinese children. Some
teachers told Business Insider their children had begun using
Lingo Bus so they could communicate with their parents'
students.

caption

VIPKid CEO and founder Cindy Mi embraces a teacher at the Journey conference in Salt Lake City, Utah in March.

source

Courtesy of VIPKID

Mikell Brown and her husband,
Nick, have taught for VIPKid for the past year, taking on 25
lessons and 55 lessons a week, respectively. For Brown, the
cultural education has been one of the most rewarding aspects of
the experience. Through the classes, she has picked up knowledge
about important Chinese festivals and cultural traditions and has
learned simple words for her students.

"Culturally, it has just opened
my eyes to the beautiful, wonderful country," Brown
told Xinhua, a
state-run press agency, in May. "Even my children, any time they
hear about China, they say, 'Oh, my mom works in China.' And they
love it."

Brown told Business Insider about
a moment this past winter when she realized her student had never
seen snow. Brown, who lives in Utah, pointed the webcam out the
window so the student could see the mountainous Utah landscape
blanketed in white. The student was fascinated. It was a special
moment, she said.

Valerie Ragland, a
44-year-oldinfant nurse,
first began teaching for VIPKid in late 2016 to save money for
her wedding. A few months after the wedding, her husband asked
when she was going to stop working for the company. She is now
the administrator of VIPKid's largest Facebook group, VIPKid Newbie
Support (more than 24,000 members), in which new teachers
interact in a kind of digital teachers lounge.

Ragland's first student was an
8-year-old girl named Kitty. After a few lessons, Kitty announced
that she was going to get her long jet-black braids cut short so
she and Ragland could be twins.

"I'm an African-American from
Dayton, Ohio," Ragland told Business Insider. "She's in China.
She saw me. She still doesn't know what that meant to me."
Ragland had liver failure a few years prior, she says, and had to
shave one side of her head.

"For this little girl to want her
hair cut like me, with all my imperfections and short hair, it
changed the way I looked at my relationship with all of my
students," Ragland said. She recently told her husband that she
plans to keep teaching permanently. The impact she is having on
students on the other side of the globe, she said, has her
hooked.

"They weren't just green boxes.
It was a child whose parent loved them as much as I loved my
child."